![]() Many of Etsy’s sellers live at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. The report does not list information for people with disabilities. sellers, according to a company report, and LGBTQ+ people make up 14 percent, which is about double the national population estimates. Women make up 79 percent of the site’s U.S. Seven LGBTQ+ Etsy sellers, three of whom are people with disabilities, told The 19th that increasing fees and pressure from the company leave them questioning whether they can continue to maintain their shops. ![]() The protesting sellers put their shops in “vacation mode” beginning on Monday through April 18. The company’s incentives for fast shipping and customer response rates also lead to less promotion for the platform’s smaller shops, the sellers said. This week Grimm joined more than 17,000 frustrated Etsy sellers to strike in protest of policies they argue have strayed from the company’s mission to make entrepreneurship more accessible. “They are basically expecting marginalized people and expecting small creators to behave like corporations.” “They want us to act like a warehouse, because they make money that way,” Grimm, 35, told The 19th. When Etsy set another fee increase for this month, it became too much for Grimm. This time around, however, Grimm noticed Etsy charged creators more in fees for each item they listed and sold. They had used the creator-focused e-commerce site to sell jewelry in 2010 and decided to set up a new shop selling their Victorian-style jewelry designs in January 2021. Their girlfriend could not find a job either, and the couple found themselves on the brink of eviction. Being immunocompromised and a person with disabilities, they could no longer do photography or create paintings that involved working with models in person. Like so many others, Grimm, an artist based in Portland, Oregon, hit a financial low point in 2020. ![]() This article was originally published by The 19th on April 15, 2022.įor Brontë Grimm, Etsy was supposed to be a reprieve from the pandemic’s economic toll.
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